SUSE partners with Colombina to drive faster access to business insight, achieving 8% revenue growth

“In total, we estimate that we have shrunk the cost of business and operations analysis and reporting by as much as 10%. Even though our new analytics capabilities are not yet live, we’ve measured an 8% uptick in our revenue, thanks in large part to the faster access to business insights we’re gaining through SAP S/4HANA on SUSE Linux Enterprise.” Jesus Antonio Brand​, CIO, Colombina.

Colombina, one of Colombia’s lead­ing manufacturers of candies, choco­lates and baked goods, goes to market through retailers across the country—including smaller, independent stores. The company saw a valuable op­portunity to build its new, all-natural “Colombina 100%” brand through this channel, but it understood that smaller stores often lacked the capability to analyze customer buying trends and find the perfect quantity, assortment and promotions to maximize sales.

Colombina aimed to empower smaller retailers to find the best recipe for sales growth. In laying the digital foundation to solve these tough analytics challenges the technology team embarked on an extensive digital transformation program.

Transitioning to SAP S/4HANA promised to create a solid foundation for complex and computationally demanding analytics workloads. To achieve a smooth migration to the new solutions—and to ensure ongoing 24/7 availability—the company decided to deploy SAP S/4HANA on IBM Power Systems servers running the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for SAP Applications operating system.

Driving business growth through faster insights and maximum availability

Using SLES for SAP Applications as its operating system for vital SAP solutions, Colombina has ensured 24/7 availability. Delivering a smooth migration was also a critical requirement and Colombina was not disappointed. The company was able to switch over to SAP S/4HANA within a planned downtime window of just four days, helping it achieve its goal of a nondisruptive migration as well as building confidence in the reliability, availability and scalability of its infrastructure.

Colombina has already reaped substantial benefits from mov­ing to SAP S/4HANA, running on IBM Power Systems servers with SLES for SAP Applica­tions.

Enhanced database compression in SAP S/4HANA has shrunk Colombina’s data­base from 22TB to 5.8TB, a reduction of 70%, helping to contain storage costs. New ways of working have slashed the time to generate invoicing reports by 97%, and the time to produce plant planning and management reports by a factor of 12.

Colombina is saving significant time for employees in important back-office roles, liberating them to focus on value-added work. It is estimated that the cost of business and operations analysis and reporting has been shrunk by 10%. With new analytics capabilities coming online Colombina has enjoyed an 8% uptick in revenue, thanks in large part to the faster access to business insights gained through SAP S/4HANA on SUSE Linux Enterprise, coupled with 24/7 availability.

As it continues to develop its retail ana­lytics capabilities, Colombina is confident that it will soon be able to put valuable in­sights right at its sales team’s fingertips, empowering them to supercharge Colom­bina’s growth in the ultracompetitive FMCG space.

Click here to find out more about how faster insights and maximum availability have powered Colombina’s business growth.